British Homelifts enters liquidation amid mounting speculation

Access provider British Homelifts is being wound up, AMP can confirm, after mounting speculation in the last couple of weeks regarding the company’s trading status.

Business recovery group Leonard Curtis has been appointed as liquidator for the Cheshire-based company Britannia Homelifts Ltd, which traded as British Homelifts and whose website and phone lines have been down since the end of last month.

Leonard Curtis issued a statement saying: “The company and its director took the decision to place the company into liquidation as a result of decreasing sales and the loss of an essential contract.

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“The joint liquidators will be updating creditors in due course.”

It has not yet been divulged what will happen to British Homelifts’ stock and assets.

British Homelifts has traded under several names in the past, including Churchill Stairlifts Plc, according to one member of the lifts sector. Churchill Stairlifts was run by Craig James Paterson, who has directed a number of companies which have since been dissolved or liquidated.

British Homelifts appeared in the press at the end of last year when one customer was left without a lift for three months after having paid an £8,000 deposit for a reconditioned lift.

After the Lancaster Guardian approached the company it said it would install a new unit at no extra cost for the customer.

In a similar recent incident, Platinum Stairlifts stepped in to help a convent which had lost out after paying a deposit to a company, alleged to be British Homelifts, for a stairlift. The Sisters were said to be disappointed when the company “let them down and they were left without the stairlift” they needed.

Belinda Rogers was appointed as director of Britannia Homelifts in February 2016.

In May 2017 Acorn Mobility challenged a claim made on Britannia Homelifts’ website that its staff were trained by occupational therapists. But the Advertising Standards Agency dismissed the case, saying “we acknowledged that the training was given to all staff and that it was run quarterly”.